For Tennessee Williams, the “Camino Real” of life is a nightmarish flight from reality that dead-ends in a plaza patrolled by street cleaners who daily carry off the dead. One of Williams’s most imaginative plays, “Camino Real” was first staged in an abbreviated form in an Actors Studio workshop; now Target Margin Theater is presenting that version as a one-act called “Ten Blocks on the Camino Real.”

When “Camino Real” landed on Broadway in 1953 critics did not know what to make of it. Williams had scored a string of successes with “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “The Rose Tattoo,” but those plays had perceptible plots and people. “Camino Real” was a kind of fantasy set in a parallel world with a cast of characters that includes Kilroy, Casanova, Marguerite Gautier and cameo appearances by Lord Byron and Don Quixote.

Photo

Satya Bhabha in Tennessee Williamss
play "Ten Blocks on the Camino Real," directed by David Herskovits, at the Ohio Theater in SoHo.Credit
Yi Zhao

“Ten Blocks on the Camino Real” is more a collection of notes for a play than a play itself, a pastiche of scenes (what Williams called blocks) that the playwright expanded and increased to 16 for the final version. The director David Herskovits has mounted a lively and energetic staging at the Ohio Theater in SoHo, but most of the brief vignettes are so slight it is difficult to find a coherent thread tying them together.

While enigmatic, the full-length play contains some of Williams’s most poetic imagery, and a sampling of it can be found in “Ten Blocks.” The focus of the short version is Kilroy, an American boxer who once held a Golden Gloves title but had to give up the ring because he had a “heart as big as the head of a baby,” and it could burst at any time. Doctors warned him he must even give up sex. “A kiss could kill me,” he says.

Kilroy consults a Gypsy fortuneteller, and ends up with her daughter, Esmeralda, whose virginity is magically restored at a fiesta held every month. In the end, however, Kilroy cannot escape the attention of the street cleaners. Casanova, who is “drinking the dregs of a wasted life,” and Gautier, who has “outlived the tenderness of my heart,” appear only briefly in “Ten Blocks,” sketches of the characters that Williams turned into portraits of desperation in the longer version of the play.

Satya Bhabha gives a fine performance as Kilroy, by turns angry and frightened as a young American prizefighter lost in an unknown land and a heartbeat from death. Purva Bedi is seductive and elusive as Esmeralda.